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HOMER 



, AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE 
THE 

Wilts Xcttrra unit itiitott ^tlcsopjitfal 

SOCIETIES 

OF 

DICKINSON COLLEGE, July, 11th, 1855. 

BY 

KEY. D?D. WHEDON, D.D. 

[an honorary member of the belles lettres society.] 



CARLISLE, PENN'A. 

PRINTED AT THE HERALD OFFICE. 



1855. 



> 



•\ 






'04, 



HOMER, 



i 
Gentlemen of the Belles Lettees 

and Union Philosophical Societies : 

The attractive pursuits which form the bond of 
union of your fraternities suggest to me not to move 
any deep question of science or metaphysics, in 
which, as heretofore I might be tempted to indulge; 
but with you to range, for a brief excursion, over 
the field of esthetic literature. We will seek less 
the precious metal whose richness coruscates deeply 
in the mine, than the flowerets scattered by the 
hand of spring over the sunny surface of the living 
landscape. Yet, remembering that I am now not 
quite in the muses' bower, but under the shadow of 
the halls, where science sheds some severity, and 
breathes some earnest depth, even into the spirit of 
lighter literature, I select a topic in which fancy 
shall still be sobered by sedater thought. Allow 
me, without being supposed to interfere with the 
prerogatives of your Professors' chairs, to select a 
topic from your College course. Permit me to pre- 
sent for your contemplation the illustrious bard of 
antiquity — the laureate of the classic ages — the 
Poet Homek. 



i ip mil inn inn inn mil u mil mil mi mi 



On the spacious poetic arena of the two great 
worlds of ancient and modern literature, there 
stand two transcendent spirits of kindred genius — 
rivals to each other — by all others unrivalled — 
Homer and Shakspeare. Rivals, I say, and yet 
they stand at centuries of distance, unknown and 
unenvying each other. I pronounce them of kin- 
dred genius. No matter that one is epic, and the 
other dramatic. No matter that one spoke the 
almost miraculous Greek and the other magically 
moulded the plastic English. No matter that one 
trod the luxuriant soil of the summery Ionia; and 
the other hardened amid the Hyperborean blasts of 
the, rugged Britannia. Beneath all the external 
accidents of form, language and clime, there is the 
created oneness of kindred genius and coequal great- 
ness. There they stand — that wondrous two — 
the peerless pair — the highest masters in the highest 
walks of aesthetic art and power — two greatest of 
the sons of genius— two truest geniuses of the sons 
of men. 

I called Homer the laureate of antiquity. I 
now call Homer and Shakspeare both laureates of 
nature — laureates of all external, earthly nature — 
specially laureates of the highest, namely, human 
nature. And their range is wide as all nature's 
range. They have a spiritual omnipresence all 
nature through. Into what depths of human 
heart, what chaos of human passions, have they 
not descended? What combination of cunning or 
formation of beauty have they not threaded ? The 
reader of Shakspeare finds Shakspeare's sayings 



cross him at every turn of life. The lines of 
Homer intertwined with all a Grecian's changes; 
and his spirit permeated all the Grecian ages. They 
were minds that had no one manner but every 
manner. They, each, seemed to possess all the 
characters of human kind within their own. 

But who is this Homer? Here all erudition, 
ancient and modern pauses. It interrogates history 
— but history is then in her childhood, and she 
prattles innocent incredibilities about him. It 
opens his own wondrous works; but he is too 
wrapt with his own entrancing themes to tell one 
fact about himself. Plagued with the tantalizing 
problem of this great authorship — a problem before 
which the question, who teas Junius? is not fit to 
be asked — the ancient Greek epigrammatist re- 
solved that Homer was Jove himself; for none 
inferior could have produced those immortal works. 
If all other great creations, traceable back to an 
origin of mystery, were reverently attributed to 
Jove supreme, why not those mighty creations, the 
Iliad and the Odyssey ? Were they not two miracu- 
lous worlds — a twin pair of universes in them- 
selves? Not quite satisfied with this solution, 
modern erudition, German and sceptical, takes up 
her microscope; and under its solving gaze, the 
solid person of Homer, evaporates — gasifies into a 
my tit! The mythic gas then evolves and con- 
volves, and soon under" the incantations of the 
German magician, it begins to condense, solidify; 
and lo! instead of one, twenty Homers stand in 
goodly phalanx before us. But, verily, this is 



i Din inn mil inn mil mil mil inn mil mil mi III! 



liberal. Who would cry for one Homer lost, when 
he is compensated by a brace of Homers restored? 
These mighty master-pieces, then, were not pro- 
duced by Homer merely, but by Homer & Co! It 
is altogether a company concern — the joint stock 
in trade of a corporation. And, then, the wonder 
of greatness and genius is entirely solved, by in- 
geniously distributing it among a number of pro- 
prietors, with each his fractional dividend. On 
such a theory I should be uncrupulous in using 
ridicule; since argument is almost out of place. 
One Homer seems to me quite enough to admit in 
all the rolling centuries; but our Teutonic cousins 
demand my faith in a score. # They reduce the 
miracle by multiplication. Twenty Homers, all in 
one age and all at work upon one job! the 
omnivorous faith of scepticism — the credulity of 
unbelief — the superstition of infidelity ! The 
human race never furnished twenty Homers. 
There is not sparkle enough in the current of 
human vitality to generate them. The rolling 
river of human blood has not fire enough. Besides 
the Iliad is one — grandly one! One with all its 
free varieties; varieties of event — varieties of 
spirit. It is one with all its discrepancies and for- 
getfulness of itself. Its very varieties prove its 
oneness; since they speak for themselves as the 
varied unfoldings of one same boundless creative- 
ness. I do not know then who Homer is ; — whether 
he should be called by the letters that spell that 
name, or that spell the name of Jove. But this I 
know, that I could sooner believe that Paradise 



Lost was written by a herd of Miltons, than that 
the Iliad was written by as many Homers. I feel 
myself, when under his song, as listening to the 
ever weaving spell of one great, unique, master 
sorcerer. Thankfully, in this late age, I receive 
the inspirations breathing through the lapse of 
ages, of that sublime, but unknown mind. It is 
not to be imagined because these immortal works 
alone have stood the test of time, that the living 
Homer was alone the poet of his age. He lived 
when the spirit of poetry was alive and vivid. 
For, account for it as we may, there is something 
wonderfully periodical in the appearance and dis- 
appearance of the galaxies of genius, in different 
ages. There seem to be great productive eras in 
genius, like the great life-periods of Geology, when 
prolific nature seems to pour from her creative 
cornucopia, the richest profusions of animated 
existence. So it was in the middle ages with the 
rise of the Troubadours in southern France. The 
spirit of history, awoke and walked over the sunny 
plains of Languedoc in the fresh bright morning of 
the thirteenth century and lo ! all the green sward 
was purpling with the bloomlets of poesy — fresh and 
moist — all new and rejoicing as if just sprinkled by 
the dewy fingers of the grey dawn. How curiously 
then did blend the syllables of the Komanic and 
Gallic tongues into that witching dialect, which 
even now enchant the perusing scholar; so truly 
styled the 'Romance language. And, then, as if by 
one unanimous consent, how did the new poets — 
real live poets — born not made — spring into being? 



i Him inn urn inn urn nut iim inn inn inn mil mi mi 



They sang, like the spring birds, they knew not 
why; and were suprised to hear their song re- 
echoed from each vocal grove, from some strange 
songster, born like them to melody. Troubadour, 
Troubadour, where got ye that wondrous strain? 
And the Troubadour answers, I did not get it — it 
came. So the most gifted of the modern daughters 
of song, Felicia Hemans, could hear and copy, as if 
with the spirit's ear, the strains awakened in her own 
soul, by the inspirations of inborn genius. And so 
it is no- intended fiction with Homer, and doubtless 
his contemporary bards, that they sang as an in- 
spiring muse — daughter of Jove and Memory — 
dictated to them. The opening invocation of the 
Troiac Epos, calling down the enchanting syllables 
of his dictating Goddess 

Mnviv deeds, Saa, 

As well as the opening prayer of the Odyssean 
legend. 

' Ai^pa [lot svv£7t6, Movtia. 

were not with the primal old bard himself a truth- 
less form — a say-so of mere poetic pretence. It 
was at a later period — an Augustan age of second- 
hand literature — when a voluntary dissembling 
took the place of the old living faith ; and when 
cold and polished imitation superseded the primeval 
warm-hearted invention, that Virgil reiterated, ac- 
cording to precedent, the soulless formula 

Musa, mihi causa memora. 

And so, according to the same tradition, through 



9 

ages of set imitation, every poetaster who strided a 
Pegasus, must also have his muse; as every Quixote 
who mounts a Rosinante must have his Dulcinea. A 
bolder age, which despises the traditions of old 
imitation as much as the illusions of legendary 
faith, furnishes its Byrons; who sing with a mimic 
mock, 

" Hail muse let cetera." 

But the conception that the visions of genius are 
a gift — that they are a visitation from a super- 
natural world — is expressed with innocent sim- 
plicity by many a son of genius in different ages. 
Says the Irish Orator, Grattan, "during the recess 
of Parliament I retired into the country, considered 
on the public affairs and thoughts and arguments 
came to me." And so says Pope of his own youth, 

" While yet a child and not a fool to fame 
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came" 

Nay even the Geometrician at the black-board, 
as the combinations of the figures are presented 
before him, consciously feels that the new inference 
comes to him not only a gift — a grace — but an 
irresistible grace. And this fact, while it serves to 
refute the error of the old philosopher, that all 
knowledge is really slumbering in the mind, and 
only needs a stimulant to awaken it; so, on the 
other hand, it does illustrate the declaration of the 
Hebrew writer, that " there is a spirit in man and 
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him under- 
standing." 



10 

But in the natural-divine economy, there seem 
to be ages rife and alive with genius; when its 
flashes dart from every point; breaking out with 
incessant electric streaks — pointed and forked — 
criss-cross and zigzag — until the whole firmament is 
ablaze with its ever varying play. Thus brilliant, 
like the age of the Provencal Troubadours, was, I 
fancy, the era of the Grecian aoidoi, of whom 
Homer was immortal chief, and strange to say the 
sole survivor and type. With his rhabdos or 
sacred wand in one hand, and his melodious Phor- 
minx on his arm, the son of the muses ranged 
along the domains of the Asiatic Greek mainland, 
or visited, in turn, the rocky isles — the Cyclades 
and Sporades of the blue iEgean. A gaze of ad- 
miration for his genius and reverence for its divine 
source, ever welcomed his approach to palace halls. 
And there he sang the legends of old heroic story; 
the sacred secrets of Olympian councils and in- 
trigues, or, taking a deeper, diviner strain, he sang 
the birth of the creation. He told how, through 
the vast void, the deep coagulated into substance, 
and marshaled into form; how the fiery beam first 
sparkled, and the throb of life first quickened; how 
the hills first raised their spontaneous heads, and 
the plains shot up their speary forests, and assumed 
their crowning verdure. Of the effects of their 
minstrelsy tales are added, no way to be believed; 
how the fauns came out of the surrounding groves 
and danced to the minstrel's measures; how the 
enchanted oaks bowed their applauding tops and 
prepared to march in order down and encore the 



11 



last performance; and how the hard-hearted Par- 
nassian rocks, gave up their critical immobility, 
and (more humane than some modern reviewers) 
all but melted at the strain. 

Now in another century, John II. king of Castile, 
said, "I will have in my kingdom genius, and 
literature and eloquence and poetry." He was 
absolute king and could do what he pleased, and 
he decreed there should be genius. He erected 
academies of arts and sciences, he salaried literati, 
he established contests of literature and prizes for 
excellence. The machinery was all erected; the 
crank was duly turned ; and the force pump brought 
forth in copious torents the Heliconian stream. 
But on its surface the life-bubbles did not sparkle; 
it had a deadish flavor; a marvellous wooden 
tAvang; as tasting of the machine. Poetry by the 
yard, made by order and made to order, was man- 
ufactured and dearly paid for — dear at any price. 
It was a cash article, not because it was worth but 
because it cost cash. But all the produce of King 
John's entire machineries were not worth the first 
dactyl of a true Greek aoidos or the lighest catch 
that Troubadour ever flung upon his careless harp. 

This world possesses, young gentlemen, but one 
truly inspired book. Yet there are one or two 
other volumes, which, though not inspired, I 
hold to be Providential hooks. What could we do 
in sacred and christian history and evidences, with- 
out Josephus? And if his publication were an 
accident, how sad the blank the accident of his 
non-publication would have left! It seems as if 



12 

that same Providence which has preserved the 
wonderful purity of the sacred text, -has taken a 
prudential care, that no proper link should be 
wanting to our honest research, to place the very 
base of its authenticity proudly above the summit 
level of any other ancient document. And now, if 
Providence designed that after ages should possess 
a daguerreotype of one fair age of antiquity; if it 
were purposed that the very life of that age should 
live forever and be beheld by the living eye of all 
subsequent time, surely, for such a purpose there 
must be created a Homer; and a Homer must 
create both an Iliad and an Odyssey. Hence, with 
what a minute accuracy must he catalogue the 
objects of antiquity! No matter how mean the 
thing ; its name shall sweetly lie along in his 
Hexameter. The hovel shall stand upon his 
grounds, picturesque yet true. The stable and the 
kitchen, with all their odors and utensils, shall be 
fully detailed, and we shall love to visit and survey 
them. And then the poet in telling every event, 
shall stand by each actor; he shall trace each 
slightest motion; he shall report each slightest 
syllable; he shall picture each instrument and 
plan each scene; until you are insensibly Homer 
himself; and you see all he saw; and you hear all 
he heard. And so goes he on, weaving his pictured 
tapestry; thread after thread; thread after thread; 
each thread adding some new touch; and each 
touch some new increase of the spell that entrances 
you. No letter fresh from Sevastapol, by a sympa- 
thising spectator or suffering actor, was ever so 



13 



minute, or ever so vivid. What others tell in a 
sentence he. pictures in a whole ballad. For 
instance, Pandarus shot an arrow. That is the 
whole of it; but hear how Homer sings it; as by 
me spoilt into English prose. 

He pulled the covering off the quiver, and drew out an arrow, 

Unshot, winged, source of black pains. 

Quickly upon the leather-string he neatly fits the bitter arrow, 

And he vowed to Apollo Lycian-born, archer-god, 

To offer him a renowned hecatomb of first-born lambs, 

When he should get home to his city of sacred Zeleia. 

He grasped at once the arrow-notch and its ox-hide string; 

He put the string to his breast, and the iron arrow on the bow; 

And when he pulled the big bow to a circle, 

Clinked the bow, shrieked the string, leapt the arrow, 

Sharp-darting, and fierce to alight amid the crowd. 

The enthusiast dwells upon the pages of Homer 
from the completeness of his pictures. But the 
antiquarian and the lexicographer, come, like crows 
after the zest of battle is over, to gather up — the 
one materials for his archaeology; and the other 
words for his Dictionary. So is Homer a gazette 
from antiquity to modern ages. He is poetry for 
the romancer and science for the savan. He is 
picture for the connoisseur; and statistics for the 
census-man. 

I have spoken of Homer's language as the most 
miraculous Greek. The process by which the 
unsettled and discordant chaos of an unformed 
language crystalizes into order, beauty and power, 
has, indeed, something not only of the wonder, 
but the divinity of miracle. A German scholar, 
Schlegel, has well remarked, that over this process 



14 



— the genesis of a nascent language — a veil of 
mystery seems flung, hitherto unsolved. Surely 
nothing is more unconcertecl and elemental than 
the scattered particles of a language yet to be. 
And yet this floating confusion of drifting flood- 
wood, somehow or other, by most miraculous 
chance, erects itself into a symmetrical and tower- 
ing palace — a building not made with hands — a 
spontaneous, unplanned structure, on which no 
line was ever drawn and no hammer ever sounded 
— like, creation itself a mind-created fabric. 

In the formation of an exquisite language, like 
the Greek, the subtlest of logic and the profoundest 
of metaphysics are exerted. Yet, strange to say, we 
are well informed that some of the native tribes of 
Africa have formed a language inferior in beauty, 
symmetry and power to the Greek alone. So true 
it is that man, even rude man, acts upon a natural 
and spontaneous metaphysics, which it takes more 
than all the acumen of the schools to analyse. Or, 
rather, we may say, man acts upon spontaneous 
principles the analysis of which is the profoundest 
of metaphysics. And now the formation of a 
language of a people is the expression of the soul 
and body — the nature, of that people. All the ex- 
ternals that go to form a people's character, through 
that character, form and color the language. 

The Greek language was but the clear flowing 
out of the Grecian temperament. It was formed 
as the character of the race was formed. And 
hence the Greek, when the character of his litera- 
ture is concerned, may put the superiority of his own 



15 



language as a make-weight in his own favor. For 
instance, in comparing Homer and Shakspeare, we 
may be ready to exclaim, — But the Greek has a 
thousand times the advantage in that unrivalled 
language ; subtract from his side one quarter on ac- 
count of that magnificent advantage, the Greek 
Hexameter. Or when a New Englancler ventures 
to lay Webster's great Speech on the Land Bill 
against Demosthenes on the Crown, and he finds 
the judgment of the world inclining against him, 
he may be ready to cry out — Aye ! but with that 
glorious Greek dialect" on his lip our Daniel could 
have beaten the Grecian orator. True, replies the 
Greek, but our language is as legitimate a part of 
our boast, as our literature or our oratory. That 
language, like that literature, or rather as part and 
parcel of that literature, is the true oorn product 
of our race's genius. Our literature, language, 
hexameter and all, are the blooming out from the 
national heart — the crystalline jet sparkling up 
from that fountain of beauty — the Grecian soul. 
When, then, our immortal master-minstrel pours 
forth in his grand hexameters, such poetry as the 
world despairs to rival; when our great Athenian 
rhetor rolls out paragraphs of such oratory as no 
other human lip ever did, or ever can utter; both 
must stand, with all their own advantages, and all 
their own perfectness; producing, as a Greek, such 
masterpiece as Grecian can accomplish. 

And the Age of which Homer wrote, was truly 
styled Heroic. It had left a lofty impress on the 
memories of men. Its characters and events had 



16 

created a world wide sensation; and the age suc- 
ceeding had named the men and told the events 
with admiring wonder. There are heroic ages. 
There are periods upon whose spirits and sceneries 
rests the true picturesque; which the very mind 
that would repudiate is forced to feel. There was 
the age of Chivalry, on which the hues of romance 
will blend their entrancing effect. It was an age 
whose names melt smoothly into song; whose char- 
acters adorn the heroic legend; whose scenes will 
wind into the surpriseful plot; whose men rise 
gracefully and imposingly before • our fancy. In 
vain shall some political economist, dear good 
democrat, tell me that it is all a plain mistake. 
He will lead me out from the boudoir of the ba- 
ronial castle to show me the squalidness of the 
serfdom. He shall tell me of the insecurity of 
life, of the lawless brigandage, the unlettered igno- 
rance, the shivering superstition, the plain down- 
right misery and meanness of the times. He will 
decompose the blended hues and show me that this 
picturesque is all imagination. Imagination? I 
grant you ; it is that I said. That age could — as 
other ages cannot — entrance the imagination. So 
a revolving kaleidescope can — as a revolving din- 
ner horn cannot — entrance the vision. Be it that 
the entrancement of the kaleidescope is made up of 
glass and light and trinkets. The entrancement is 
just as real and far more possible than if made up 
of golden ingots and bankable promissory notes. 

You will not I trust for one moment imagine me 
to be one of the mourners that " the age of Chivalry 



17 



is past." A picturesque age, like a picturesque 
prospect, may be more delightful to the spectator, 
for whom "distance lends enchantment to the 
view," than to the dweller in that land of beauty. 
An age of poetic interest may please the contem- 
plator's fancy; but an age of plain enjoyment is 
the era of happiness. An age of heroism is ro- 
mantic, but an age of honesty, of justice, of right, 
of equality, is infinitely preferable. The stirring 
events that make history, do not make public hap- 
piness. The unsettled times that create heroic 
adventure, create incessant disaster and universal 
misery. 

Wonderful is the power of genius in shedding a 
perpetual enchantment over the scenes and locali- 
ties of its historic narrations or poetic fictions. 
What right has that little rocky peninsula of 
Greece to make itself the focal point of classic 
interest to succeeding ages? Because the recording 
muse of her own history has clad her with the halo 
of its glory. What right had the men, the events, 
the institutes of Athens to claim a permanent and 
resplendent place in the view and memory of the 
world ? Because they stood surrounded by the glare 
of the splendid explosions of Grecian genius. 
And so the comer from a far land, as he skirts the 
shores of the Hellespont, as he passes the Tenedos, 
and treads the Troian plain, gazes with an en- 
chanted eye. He is not now treading, ordinary, 
dirty, commonplace, earth. Every sod and every 
lump is impregnate. It has a spirit in it, And 
over yon misty plains^ spectral armies are still 
marching; spectral heroes still wave the battle 



18 



plume; a spectre city lifts its shadowy towers, girt 
with dreamy walls, and portaled with mystic 
gates. The spell of the blind old sorceror of Scio's 
rocky isle, pronounced three thousand years ago, 
still binds with its transfixing power, the gentle 
visiter of this haunted realm. 

And curious it is to remark how little the magni- 
tude and the extent of scenes and objects have to 
do with the interest we feel. He who directs his 
eye to the astronomic heavens, and sends his mind 
to range the immensity of measureless space, feels 
that this earth is a bare speck- — a point- — a mini- 
mum visible. But let him call in his contempla- 
tions, and direct his eye to the deep revelations of 
geology and lo ! within that speck a new immensity 
is opened. That point- — that minimum is found 
pregnant with a universe, whose grandeur swells 
the mind with a vastness scarce less than that 
which rose upon him from that outer immensity. 
Why? Because either vastness was enough to fill 
one little mind; and neither of course could more 
than fill it. And so, when we contemplate the 
vast areas of our globe that modern geography 
uncovers to our eye, and realise how over all the 
hemispheres, new national systems have arisen, how 
minute appear the petty strifes and wars of that 
little patch of Greece, and that little town of 
Athens. The puny navies that paddled around 
the iEgean and Ionian seas, afraid to lose the 
sight of shore, appear like the mimic craft, carved 
by our boys, for their pastime in a summer pond. 
And yet we take the volume of Thucydides, and 
when these little quarrels and fights are pictured 



19 

by his pen, they become grand history, sagacious 
politics, deep philosophy. They fill the mind as 
fully, they stir the soul as deeply, they instruct the 
intellect as profoundly, as events of far greater 
physical sizes and distances. There was a king of 
Maceclon on the northern base of the little triangle 
of Greece, against whom Demosthenes thundered, 
and the southern Republics of Greece were called 
to. combine — alas! only to be conquered. There 
was also an earlier Trojan aggressor, whose king- 
dom standing a little without the triangle, became 
the object of war from the same Greek Republics; 
it was conquered by the Grecian heroes, and sung 
by the Grecian poets. So at the present day, on 
the eastern margin of Europe, stands the empire of 
a modern young Alexander, including the eastern 
half of all Europe and the northern half of all 
Asia. Like the ancient Macedonian, he rises over 
the horizon and hovers like a storm-filled cloud 
over the civilized continent. Two proudest of 
modern empires, trembling at his dangerous power, 
have equipped and sent prouder armaments than 
history ever saw. In mere magnitude and ex- 
tension the warlike doings of classic and Homeric 
ages would compare with these, as the little moun- 
tain printed on your maps, would compare with 
the real Andes. Yet not all the eloquence of 
modern parliaments, with all its magnitude of in- 
terests, can out-thunder the Athenian agora; nor 
can all the poetic Genius of the nineteenth century 
make an Iliad of Sevastopol. 

The Homeric system of so called gods and god- 
desses is a mere poetic machinery. It rises not into 



20 

a philosophy, far less a theology. The deities of 
Olympus are only men and women of a finer 
mould, larger size and rather improved powers. 
Venus is a very handsome woman, Apollo is a 
gentleman of very rare accomplishments, and Mars 
a most gigantic military chieftain. Jupiter, whether 
imaged in Homer's hexameters, or chiseled in 
Phidias' marble, is a large and stately monarch, 
with an eye keenly clairvoyant, and an arm some- 
what less powerful than the walking-beam of a 
modern steamer. Mercury in conveying a dispatch 
was decidedly inferior to the magnetic telegraph; 
and Yulcan's thunderbolts would stand a poor 
chance in front of Colt's revolvers, to say nothing 
of Paixhan guns. What knows Homer of the in- 
finite One? What glimpse has he of him who 
filleth eternity and immensity; whose attributes, 
spread out on the wide universe, are thence divinely 
copied and spread out upon the pages of the Hebrew 
scriptures ? Some inklings seem echoing around his 
mind of a supreme, universal, eternal Fate, under 
whose laws Jupiter himself is a half-conscious sub- 
ject. But that idea of fate does not lead him up 
to that infinite Personality; from whose will and 
law alone all the fate, that is proceeds. So true it 
is that truth is not only stranger, but grander and 
sublimer than fiction. Fiction is the conception of 
man; reality the conception of God. What saw 
ancient fancy in the skies? A glassy vault stud- 
ded with starry spangles. What sees modern 
astronomy? An immensity floating with worlds. 
So science is immeasurably more poetical than 
poetry. Plato said God is a geometer. As truly, 



21 



he might have said, the Divinity is a poet. 
Creation is God's great Poem. 

The poems of Homer, by the common acknowl- 
edgment of all subsequent Grecian literature, were 
the fountain whence the brightest achievements of 
her arts were drawn. They tuned the minds of 
the sons of Hellas to that nobleness which pro- 
duced her master pieces of poetry, oratory, archi- 
tecture, painting and statuary. It has been said, 
that while the mission of Judaism was to teach 
mankind the lesson of the true Divinity ; the 
mission of Rome to shape our minds to the majesty 
of a state; the mission of Greece was to develope and 
educate the world to the idea of the beautiful. 
And thus do our modern ages inherit the threefold 
patrimony of the religious, the politic and the 
aesthetic — producing the full developement of the 
ideas of right, order and refinement. What the Old 
Testament was to the mission of Israel, the solemn, 
sublime and stern inculcator of God and conscience ; 
that the Homeric poems were to Greece, the Testa- 
ment of the aesthetic — the fountain of the beauti- 
ful. And so was every part of the Grecian mind 
harmonised to a perfect ideality. This was ex- 
hibited, variedly, in the symmetrical architecture 
of Phidias; in the severe chasteness of the Attic 
drama; in the exquisite proportions of the Praxite- 
lean statuary; in the purity and power of Athenian 
oratory; nay in the very demonstrative exactness 
of the Geometry of Euclid and the syllogism of 
Aristotle. Herein has consisted the true classic 
spirit — in the true blending of luxuriance and 
precision into a most chaste medium of perfected 






22 

taste — which born in Greece and transmitted to 
later ages has educated the mind of modern Europe 
to that exactitude, art, beauty, reason and practicali- 
ty which has constituted Europe's historic greatness* 
The classic has been and is the teacher of the practical. 
It has been lately said by a great American his- 
torian, that the fundamental idea of Christianity — 
the unity of deity and humanity in the world's 
Messiah — has through all modern ages tended to 
raise the soul of man towards God, and elevate the 
level of human history. In a far inferior sense, 
we may say, that the same idea, conceived in ac- 
cordance with the mission of ancient Greece, of a 
divine humanity, tended to idealize and ennoble 
the material and gross realities of life. It was in 
short the main source of the beautiful. True, 
Homer did deify man as he is. He is liable to the 
charge brought against him with so much point by 
Longinus, that Homer made his men Gods and his 
gods men. In this we see by contrast the true 
divinity of Christianity. The Homeric Mythology 
deified man as he is; the Christian theology deified 
man as he should be. The former is the apotheosis 
of man's natural qualities, his depraved traits not 
transformed but transfigured; the latter presents 
perfect man and perfect God in unity. The ten- 
dency of the former was to invest with ideal lustre 
the corporeal, the intellectual, and the powerful, 
in connection with the lower and fiercer attributes 
of man's nature ; the purpose of the latter is to take 
in all the ennoblement with which humanity can 
be invested, to purify man from lower nature, to 
elevate him above nature, and then to assimilate 



him by purity and faith to the God with whom i 
brings him in contact. 

This suggestive comparison, young gentlemen, 
with Homer, may relieve the minds of some men 
of finished educational taste, of that repugnance 
and even doubt arising from the fact that the Old 
Testament and the New do not obey the rules oi 
rhetoric; nor stand the perfect and faultless moclek 
of symmetry and aesthetic taste. The Bible, re- 
member, is not the book of beauty; but the book 
of religion, the book of conscience, the book of 
God. And though there be peals of surpassing 
beauty issuing from its grandeurs, yet is its main 
quality sublime and solemn. Its purpose is to 
train the spiritual, not the aestlietical man. We 
may see, in every-clay life, men, whose moral feel- 
ings are high; whose pious character is blameless 
and deep. Yet is their taste rude and their man- 
ners ungraceful. Their character, as christians, 
may be perfect; but in their character as complete 
and model men, we feel a sense of very obvious 
imperfection. Now it is not the province of the 
Bible to teach specifically the aestlietical, any more 
than the scientific. But when to that religion 
which we obtain from the Bible, are added that 
knowledge we derive from science, and that re- 
finement we secure from aesthetics, then do we 
obtain the qualities of the Christian, the scholar, 
and the gentleman united in the finished man. 

Our sacred volume is not the book of the fancy, 
or the taste; it is the book of the soul. Yet 
through the moral, does it finally attain to a higher 
beauty than poetry ever dreamed, than aesthetics 



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ever taught. Achilles was the highest human 
model of Pagan poetry. But after mentioning 
Achilles, scarce dare we name that divine concep- 
tion — that true immaculate conception — that ulti- 
mate of human excellence suffused with divinity, 
which Christianity presents in the person of the 
God-man, the pure perfection of moral beauty. 

Allow me to close then, sons of Dickinson, by 
congratulating you on the fact, that in accordance 
with the liberalised religious feeling of the age, 
the enlightened curators of your venerated Alma 
Mater do not fear to unite in your education, the 
classical, the scientific and the sacred. Remember 
that above all literature is God's own word; and 
the crown of a finished education is holy religious 
principle. Learn that aesthetic refinements may 
ornament a religious character; yet they are not 
i necessary to its very existence. Nor allow the 
critical taste which education has supplied you, 
to generate an effeminate repulsiveness towards 
christian graces or the expression of spiritual truth, 
emotion, or experience, unassociated with taught 
refinements. Let the training of your sensibilities 
rather qualify you to the quick enjoyment of the 
excellent, than to sensitive suffering for the defective* 
So shall you carry a chaste and serene spirit, 
though duty call you to deal with the homelier 
realities of life; and yet an appreciative enjoyment 
amid its higher walks. And so shall your char- 
acters exhibit what is lovely and of good report in 
the eyes of man, and what shall secure acquittal 
beneath the all searching scrutiny of your final 
judge. 



LIE 



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